So, does Sony actually have a plan for their live-action Spider-Man movies at this point?

Sony’s Spider-Man conundrum continues to be utterly fascinating. The studio has essentially been forced to create an assembly line of Spider-Man-themed movies in order to maintain their grip on the Web-Slinger’s movie license, lest it expire and revert back to Marvel. This leaves Sony Pictures as the one remaining studio that can make Marvel movies independent of Marvel’s own oversight, and the gospel mandate of the Marvel Cinematic Universe. Over the past few years in particular, these resulting efforts have been incredibly, and fascinatingly, polarized.

On the one hand, Sony has recently delivered two of the best comic book movies of all time via their animated Spider-Verse offerings. On the other hand however, Sony has also run aground yet again with their live-action Marvel movies that exist outside of the MCU, thanks to their ludicrously mismanaged ‘Sony’s Spider-Man Universe’ continuity. Two not great, but nonetheless lucrative Venom movies notwithstanding, the SSU has sustained grievous damage already, following the absolute trainwreck that was 2022’s Morbius, a movie that became an audience laughingstock, and also went on to become Sony’s biggest Marvel-licensed flop. The fallout from Morbius was then further exacerbated by the repeated delays of this year’s fellow anti-hero vehicle, Kraven the Hunter, another Sony-made Marvel movie about a frequent foe of Spider-Man from Marvel Comics lore, whose first trailer didn’t do much to allay fears that it’s another Morbius situation waiting to happen.

Then there’s Madame Web, a high-profile SSU movie that Sony seemed especially keen to produce at one point. Despite its eponymous character not currently headlining her own comic book series at Marvel, Sony was nonetheless very keen to fast-track a movie about the Spider-Man franchise’s multiverse-tapping medium, likely seeing her as a very efficient way to tightly bond the SSU and the MCU, once upon a time. Since then however, the awe-inspiring failure of Morbius and evident issues with Kraven the Hunter, along with other planned SSU projects like Jackpot, Nightwatch, Silver Sable, Black Cat and El Muerto, among others, all appearing to be stuck in development hell at this point (even the recently-retired DC Extended Universe would tip its hat to that sheer landslide of stalled movies!), have collectively called into question Sony’s continued commitment to the SSU, as it currently exists.

That creative hammer now seems to be ready to come down as well. More recent marketing efforts from Sony and director, S.J. Clarkson have appeared to retroactively distance Madame Web from the struggling SSU, instead potentially placing it within its own self-contained universe, at least, from the perspective of its filmmakers. You know, another one, because Sony wasn’t creating enough of these Spider-Man cinematic universes already!

Initially, I, personally speculated that this could be a knee-jerk reaction to the faceplanting of Morbius, with Sony seemingly having high hopes for Madame Web for a time, and logically not wanting it to be associated with such a spectacular misfire of a movie. After seeing Madame Web for myself however, I’ve now made my way to a different theory altogether; Madame Web is too terrible for even the SSU to adequately accommodate.

I don’t know how, but Sony somehow made a movie that’s even worse than Morbius in several crucial aspects. Morbius was a very bad movie to be sure, but, like the two Venom movies that preceded it, it was at least entertaining and kind of hilarious in a charming, B-movie way. Madame Web meanwhile feels like a feature-length CW pilot that struggles to even be ironically entertaining. It’s clearly had most of its planned nods to a wider Spider-Man cinematic universe scrubbed out during production, and even lead star, Dakota Johnson hasn’t exactly been shy with indicating that she despises Madame Web’s final product. I can’t say I blame her. When a movie is too awful to even be publicly accepted into the same continuity as Morbius, you know you’ve got problems.

One of the biggest marketing hooks behind Madame Web is that it’s another female-fronted superhero blockbuster. On that note, its timing couldn’t have been worse. With the specter of Marvel Studios’ first-ever true box office bomb, The Marvels, another female-fronted superhero blockbuster, hanging over its release, Madame Web’s failures feel all the more painful and embarrassing, even as it comes from another studio.

A major issue here is that Madame Web’s marketing just straight up lies to its audience; There are no superheroes in this story. With images of its teen protagonists donning their comic-accurate costumes splashed all over Madame Web’s trailers, you’d be forgiven for not realizing that these images are entirely constrained to flash-forwards and dream sequences in the movie proper. Hell, I wouldn’t even genuinely describe Madame Web as an action blockbuster at all, frankly, since its action sequences are virtually non-existent, outside of a noisy, cheap-looking climax. Instead, Madame Web operates more like a supernatural thriller, centering on a protagonist that gains clairvoyant superpowers after a near-death experience, following a birth at the hands of some spider-themed jungle people. I’m not joking.

Sony quickly trips over the demand to make Cassandra “Cassie” Webb a more action-oriented character, even while this movie re-envisions her as a younger, allegedly sexier reluctant hero. In Marvel Comics lore, Cassandra Webb is instead a blind, elderly, wheelchair-bound fortune teller, as well as something of a guardian spirit for various Spider-Man Family characters from across Marvel’s multiverse. That’s certainly a far cry from Dakota Johnson’s younger, crankier take on the character, one that seems more concerned with ducking a kidnapping charge than actually doing any real good in the world.

“A major issue here is that Madame Web’s marketing just straight up lies to its audience; There are no superheroes in this story.”

Say what you will about Tom Hardy’s Venom or Jared Leto’s Morbius, but at least they genuinely cared about trying to make the world better through their pre-superpower vocations in some small way. Cassie, meanwhile, feels like she has almost open contempt for the people whose lives she saves as a paramedic, let alone the three teenage girls that the timeline has teased will one day become noble, spider-themed superheroes. Johnson’s lead personality is in fact so prickly, bewildered and guileless with her powers that she quickly becomes impossible to like or invest in, immediately deflating her own journey as someone that’s supposed to be a more morally sound figure than the other protagonists of the SSU so far.

As for the three teenage supporting leads, they don’t fare much better. Given paper-thin development, and no meaningful journeys when it comes to their future superhero identities, Sydney Sweeney’s Julia Cornwall, Isabela Merced’s Anya Corazon, and Celeste O’Connor’s Mattie Franklin are equally wasted as ineffectual adolescent charges to Cassie. Their personalities never extend beyond shy, logical and rude, respectively, with their connections to Cassie being extremely tenuous, and their ‘found family’ evolution never really feeling valid or interesting. They all simply exist as a bunch of C-list Spider-Man comic book characters that are thrown together for a movie because the writers and/or the studio demand it.

This is very frustrating, because the concept behind Madame Web is legitimately interesting. Had it not been a sophomore SSU script from the same writers as Morbius (yes, seriously), it might have actually created a more distinct and interesting production. The way that the movie inverts superhero convention by having its Spider-Man figure function as a Terminator-style villain, complete with his own tech support, thanks to a thoroughly wasted Zosia Mamet (this Arrowverse-style trope only furthers the feeling that Madame Web unfolds like it belongs on The CW), could have been a cool twist on superhero movies. In the end though, Madame Web brings absolutely nothing to the table for its female leads, with the movie’s awful script rendering them all immediately unappealing as would-be franchise headliners.

Another major hook behind Madame Web is that it’s ostensibly positioned as a prequel for the SSU, or, at least, that’s clearly how it was pitched. Taking place in 2003, Madame Web almost stumbles on a clever creative direction for the SSU completely by accident; After so many Marvel fans defended the Venom movies and Morbius as feeling like fun, if generally ridiculous throwbacks to the adolescent comic book movie era of the 2000’s, Madame Web appears to drop the pretense by just setting itself within the 2000’s.

Beyond some very aggressive product placement and period flourishes for New York however (some of which are even anachronistic, such as Sony shoving their PSP gaming handheld from 2005 into a scene where it shouldn’t exist yet), Madame Web doesn’t really find an interesting way to leverage its period setting. Outside of no one having smartphones, Madame Web’s events and details would have remained largely unchanged if it had taken place in the present day. Of course, it doesn’t help that Madame Web’s villain, Ezekiel Sims, another shallow archetype played in an especially thankless role by French actor, Tahar Rahim, has a near-omnipotent tech support lady that feels like she was plucked out of The CW’s superhero dramas.

On the note of Sims, who is a much more complex and interesting character in Marvel Comics lore (though this should go without saying), I have to say that I don’t remember even the hokier comic book movie villains of the 2000’s being quite this forgettable. Poor Rahim is ADR’d to hell and back as well, even more so than the other actors, almost sounding like a patched-together, terrible re-dub of himself throughout his scenes as Sims. Sims’ status as an ‘evil Spider-Man’ in this movie is utterly wasted when his character’s motivations are illogical and often impossible to explain as well. It’s like Madame Web’s script isn’t even trying to make Sims feel like a real person with real depth, instead making him a cheap plot device that exists solely to create an obstacle for the leads. Sure, the 2000’s weren’t often a golden era for comic book movie villains, but even the worst of that crop at least had the decency to ham it up and show some personality while the rest of their movie crumbles around them.

Madame Web appears to have been initially designed to be both a gateway to a sprawling ‘Spider-Verse’ of live-action Spider-Man movies from Sony, movies that didn’t necessarily need to connect across one central universe (this likely would have included an inter-dimensional connection to Marvel’s own MCU), as well as a way to introduce the Spider-Man Family proper to the world of Sony’s Venom and Morbius movies. Somewhere along the line, many of these plans appear to have been scrapped during production, ultimately leaving Madame Web as a confused, ill-plotted narrative disaster that’s mostly billed as part of Sony’s ongoing SSU canon, but truthfully doesn’t fit that smoothly into any of Sony’s established Spider-Man movie universes.

“Thus, with all of its most interesting narrative prospects bleached out of the final product, Madame Web is left to build toward a big nothing burger.”

Compounding the confusion is the fact that several Spider-Man franchise characters that have been featured in the MCU, such as Aunt May and Peter Parker/Spider-Man himself, appear to be unable to be acknowledged by name in Madame Web for whatever reason. This is despite the Parker family playing sizable roles in the movie, with Adam Scott portraying a younger ‘Uncle’ Ben Parker, now reimagined as a paramedic partner to Cassie, while Ben’s sister-in-law, Mary Parker, played by Emma Roberts, is conveniently pregnant with a baby that she never names, but is very obviously supposed to be this universe’s future Spider-Man. I say that because Madame Web’s scrub job is pretty sloppy in some places, conspicuously leaving in throwaway lines and noticeable details that pretty firmly touch on what significance they were meant to have when it comes to the Spider-Man Family, and how this movie was designed to follow the visual ruleset of the SSU.

Thus, with all of its most interesting narrative prospects bleached out of the final product, Madame Web is left to build toward a big nothing burger. It’s a horrendously dull movie that limps forward off of a series of inconsequential events, making it not only a thriller that’s pretty much entirely devoid of thrills, but also a completely superfluous addition to the legacy of Sony’s Spider-Man movies. This especially hurts after the SSU finally dared to break away from its current formula of eccentric middle-aged men getting volatile superpowers that constantly threaten to force them into violence, aggression and insanity (if you smiled at that prose, congratulations, you’re as nerdy as I am!), only to stumble off of Madame Web featuring a series of supposed heroines that can’t ultimately find it in themselves to be heroines, or villains, or anyone of consequence.

(NOTE: The ‘spoiler’ section, when clicked, discusses whether Madame Web has any post-credits scenes, whether it features any additional Marvel characters of note, and whether it sets up any future projects for the SSU, or any other Sony-run Spider-Man franchise.)

Madame Web feels like it has the bones of a genuinely ambitious, inspired superhero blockbuster, but its final product went so spectacularly wrong, and not even in a fun way. Instead, as a female-fronted franchise starter, and as an effort to try something genuinely new with the Spider-Man movie license, Madame Web is an absolute failure, to the point of being a genuine cinematic catastrophe at its worst. It’s enough to make you forgive Morbius for its own myriad faults, because Morbius, terrible as it is, had the decency to at least pass muster as ‘so bad, it’s good’ B-movie trash.

Madame Web, by contrast, is critically devoid of personality, fun, humour, excitement, suspense, intrigue, and pretty much anything that makes for an enjoyable superhero blockbuster. Its novel concept is wholly wasted on CW-level banality and production values, and whether or not it truly is canon to Sony’s previous crop of SSU movies is frankly irrelevant, because I imagine that the studio will very quickly abandon this property regardless.

This brings me back to my original question; Is there even a plan for Sony’s live-action Spider-Man franchise at this point? I guess, on the bright side, Kraven the Hunter now has a really low bar to clear this Summer…